Stellaria media
Stellaria media, chickweed, is an annual flowering plant in the family Caryophyllaceae. It is native to Eurasia and naturalized throughout the world, where it is a weed of waste ground, farmland and gardens. It is sometimes grown as a salad crop or for poultry consumption.

Kaldari · CC0 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Sits inside
- StellariaPBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Angiospermae
Time the record covers
At least 1.7 million years on record.
The record covers at least 5.333 Mya to 3.6 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 11.63 Mya to 2.58 Mya.
2 occurrences of Stellaria media on record. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group, and the chart stops with its fossils rather than at the present. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
2 occurrencesThese are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Found in
1 formation
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The named rock units Stellaria media has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 1 occurrence has no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Found in the same rock
16 taxa- Aster1 site
- Astragalus1 site
- Carex1 site
- Chenopodium gracilispicum1 site
- Coniferophyta1 site
- Corydalis1 site
- Eurya stigmosa1 site
- Fragaria1 site
- Polygonum1 site
- Polygonum nepalense1 site
- Ranunculus tachiroei1 site
- Rubus1 site
- Rumex1 site
- Schoenoplectus1 site
- Stellaria petiolaris1 site
- Zanthoxylum avicennae1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 1 site for Stellaria media, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
2 references- Rise of herbaceous diversity at the southeastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau: First insight from fossils1
- Miocene floras in the lower Rhenish basin and their ecological interpretation1
Each of the 2 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content2
Picture of Stellaria media
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Kaldari
- Licence
- CC0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
3D model
- Source
- Sketchfab
- Licence
- CC0 Public Domain
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itStellaria through timeThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Linnaeus 1753)